Beijing’s ‘Sphere of Influence’ to Expand if US Navy Fails to Grow

If the US Navy’s 275-ship fleet does not reach the Pentagon’s goal of 355 vessels, Washington is "more or less incentivizing the [Chinese Navy] into thinking they could achieve a sphere of influence," Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi said Tuesday.

US President Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to grow the US fleet to 350 ships—a target in line with the Congressional Research Service’s 2016 conclusion that 355 ships are required to meet national security strategy goals.

But financing fleet growth and doing so in a timely manner constitute major obstacles to achieving that aim. At current construction rates, the Navy will not possess a 350-ship force until at least 2035, the Congressional Budget Office’s Eric Labs told the US Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower on Tuesday.

Naval expert Jerry Hendrix from the Center for a New American Security League stressed to the Senate panel that major investments in the US shipbuilding industry would be essential for sending a message to other global powers not to mess with the US at sea.

Failure to do so encourages fellow world powers to tell other countries the US Navy cannot be relied on to ensure their maritime safety, according to the delegation of seapower specialists.

Deterring potentially hostile navies from their own fleet proliferation plans requires "a larger fleet," Clark explained, especially as "regions such as Northern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean become hotspots for great power competition and confrontation."

There’s also the argument that US fleet proliferation encourages others to accelerate shipbuilding to keep up the pace, leading to more seapower overall. The Chinese navy is "moving toward an ambition of 500 warships, including air nuclear submarines, amphibious ships and a burgeoning frigate and destroyer force," according to the Royal United Services Institute.

A spokesperson for the think tank contended that since "it is hard to recall growth at a similar pace in any navy across history … Beijing is slowly pulling ahead."

"The cost to build and operate a 355-ship fleet would average $102 billion per year (in 2017 dollars) through 2047," the CBO estimates. This figure is "more than one-third greater than the amount appropriated for fiscal year 2016 for today’s 275-ship fleet."

Simply throwing money at shipbuilders won’t magically create the 355-ship navy. The Defense Industrial Base (DIB) “is more important than any individual weapons program" and a "critical component of our national security," Hendrix wrote in a July 26 commentary for Breaking Defense. Among other factors, "waves of industrial mergers and defense contractor consolidations and naïve strategic assumptions regarding the ‘end of history’ have left America’s DIB fragile and lacking in redundant capability."

Hello,
!

We are committed to protecting your personal information and we have updated our Privacy Policy to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a new EU regulation that went into effect on May 25, 2018.

Please review our Privacy Policy. It contains details about the types of data we collect, how we use it, and your data protection rights.

Since you already shared your personal data with us when you created your personal account, to continue using it, please check the box below:

I agree to the processing of my personal data for the purpose of creating a personal account on this site, in compliance with the Privacy Policy.

If you do not want us to continue processing your data, please click here to delete your account.

promotes the use of narcotic / psychotropic substances, provides information on their production and use;

contains links to viruses and malicious software;

is part of an organized action involving large volumes of comments with identical or similar content ("flash mob");

“floods” the discussion thread with a large number of incoherent or irrelevant messages;

violates etiquette, exhibiting any form of aggressive, humiliating or abusive behavior ("trolling");

doesn’t follow standard rules of the English language, for example, is typed fully or mostly in capital letters or isn’t broken down into sentences.

The administration has the right to block a user’s access to the page or delete a user’s account without notice if the user is in violation of these rules or if behavior indicating said violation is detected.